The Story
Mother Teresa dedicated her whole life to being a nun and a missionary, providing comfort and relieving suffering among the poor of India. She was so dedicated to this cause that she won the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize.
She founded the Missionaries of Charity, a charity that provides mobile clinics, orphanages, and schools. It also manages hospices for people dying of leprosy, tuberculosis, and AIDS. Its members vow to be chaste, poor, obedient, and give wholehearted free service to the poor.
She was literally a saint
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The Roman Catholic Church granted her official sainthood in 2016.
Facts
This story is all true, except for the part about providing comfort and relieving suffering
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I'm not a social worker. I don't do it for this reason. I do it for Christ. I do it for the Church.
She was a friend of poverty, not of the poor.
As a missionary, Teresa took in the poor for the purpose of converting them to Catholicism. Faced with poverty, disease, and almost certain death, many accepted this alternative path.
Teresa believed the that path to salvation was through pain and suffering.
Suffering is a gift from God.
The orphans and diseased people that came to her were already well along that road, but she ensured that they continued on it.
Her organization received millions of dollars in donations from around the world, but rather than being used to improve the quality of care it was used to increase the quantity. By 2007 they operated over six hundred missions and shelters and employed thousands of nuns.
Her clinics and palliative care facilities were severely lacking in modern medical services. Those in pain were denied drugs, and encouraged to suffer for the good of their souls. Many that could have been cured and returned to society were allowed to linger in pain until they died.
Even what medical equipment was used, was minimal and improperly handled. Single-use needles were simply rinsed out and reused. This had the unfortunate side effect of further spreading disease among her converts. Perhaps, from her perspective, this wasn't a side effect.
She herself though had no problem accepting medical attention. Following a heart attack in 1989 she received a pacemaker implant at a modern hospital.
Why
The Roman Church has long taught that the soul is immortal, a potentially perfect spiritual being trapped in a weak and imperfect physical body. Physical pleasure weaken the soul, but physical suffering strengthen it. This doctrine originates from Greek philosophers, such as Aristotle, and Greek cults, such as Asceticism, not from the Bible.
During the Inquisition, Jews, Muslims, indigenous Americans, and heretical Christians (those that pointed out that the Church wasn't following the Bible) were tortured until they willingly
accepted Christ as their saviour, then mercifully killed so they could receive salvation.
Teresa similarly felt that torturing non-believers, and converting them before they died, was her purpose in life. By the time of her own death in 1997, this monster had achieved great success.
By declaring her to be a saint, the Roman Church not only demonstrated that it still adheres to its traditional doctrines, it confirmed to the world what a wonderful person she was.